Entities, such as broadcasters that receive, process and/or distribute content, in the form of electronic files containing audio-visual programs, typically make use of large systems for managing such content. Such large systems invariably possess the ability to monitor various operations associated with the receipt, processing and/or distribution of content. For ease of discussion, the combination of such operations will be referred as content workflow. In practice, the monitoring of content workflow results in the generation of status information, which can comprise log files and/or status messages. Depending on the number of operations associated with the cotent work flow and the volume of content received, content management systems can generate a large amount of status information. Some status information will require immediate attention by a human operator, while other status information might not require much if any attention.
The logging tools associated with present day content management systems offer little capability to view, sort and/or filter status information in a time-ordered fashion from multiple elements, comprising hardware and/or software components for carrying out content workflow. The larger the amount of status information, the more apparent this problem becomes. The logging tools of present day content management system incur another problem by virtue of their inability to convert generic log information contained in an operational alarm into relevant information upon which an operator can react as appropriate. This remains the most critical issue with the monitoring of elements and the associated filtering and notification of alarms since managed elements tend to send a huge number of false positives, causing operators to spend time chasing non relevant events.
Present day logging tools typically lack the ability to create system dashboards, i.e., visual displays of operating conditions, and the ability to generate reports. Given the large amount of status information typically generated by present-day content management systems, the operators need reports on relevant activities as well as periodic updates. The techniques that exist in present day content management systems methods for generating reports, and for creating dashboards for viewing remain inadequate in the context of a broadcast environment because of such techniques lack both functionality and flexibility.
Another disadvantage of such logging tools is their inability to perform efficient message suppression. In practice, a monitoring system that includes message logging will generate a message at regular intervals as long as the condition prompting the message remains. Such repeated messages can prove useful in the event of emergency condition. However, for many ordinary conditions, such as the completion of a particular activity, repeating a message indicative of such a condition proves wasteful. This problem plagues most monitoring applications, causing an enormous amount of data sorting and wasteful storage.
Present day content management systems also suffer from an inability to track assets within a facility. Today's content management system can move large volumes of digital assets throughout a facility but lack any standard mechanism to view and measure the quality of a digital asset at multiple locations within that facility. The lack of such a standard mechanism for viewing and measuring the quality of an asset at a given location can prevent the mixing and matching of different pieces of equipment from multiple vendors.